Transcripts For CSPAN2 Ben Westhoff Fentanyl Inc. 20240713

I dont think anyone can. Hello, are these on . So much for joining us for this panel. If you want to take a moment to silence your cellphones it would be much appreciated. Thanks so much for joining us. My name is nateblakeslee, ill be your moderator. For ben westhoff book which is called Fentanyl Incorporated how rogue chemists are treating the deadliest waveof the opioid epidemic. Its my pleasure to introduce then. Then is an awardwinning Investigative Reporter who has written several books. Two of which were about the history of rap music, ben was once the music editor for the la weekly both those books were well received as ive been this book. Ben was featured on fresh air as im sure a number of you, this is a fresh haircut and the crowd probably. It was also accepted in the atlantic and has gotten wonderful reviews so help me thank ben for coming to austin texas. Ben and i will discuss the books for probably about 30 minutes and then if anyone wants to leave 15 minutes for q a soplease stick around at the end if you have questions. Lets start at the beginning. The probably, i know there are many people in texas have never heard of fentanyl so please tell us what it is and why it is killing so many people. Eight,thank you for coming here. Its great tobe here. No, you can think of as synthetic heroin. It is the third way of the Opioid Crisis. So the first way, began in the 1990s. With the over prescription of pills like oxycontin. So there was a sea change in the way doctors started thinking about pain. And when that was combined with this deceptive advertising from Companies Like Purdue Pharma which convinced doctors that opioids were not actually addictive, in combination it led to a situation where people were receiving more pain pills than ever before. Their stories of places like kermit west virginia, a count of 400 people that received literally millions of pills a year you that our pill mills and patience, people who had legitimate needs for these pills found that when their prescriptions were finished they were addicted area and so many of them turned to street heroin. And so heroin represents is a second wave of the Opioid Crisis. Now, as of the last five years or so, in a lot of places its almost impossible to find your heroin anywhere. Almost all of its is fentanyl. And fentanyl represents the third way of the opioid epidemic. So fentanyl is also an opioid and satisfies the same cravings as prescription pills like oxycontin as well as heroin. The biggest difference is that it is the times stronger. And so drug dealers using as a costsaving measure. So a lot of times when people think theyre buying heroin, what theyre actually buying is a mixture of heroin and the sentinel so it kills them instantly. That is the crux of the fentanyl epidemic its a drug that most people dont even want. Thought a little bit about the result of this process of combining fentanyl with a known drug. What i found fascinating about the book is often the people producing the drug dont know how much until theyre putting inthere themselves. So fentanyl is also an important medical drug use in hospitals. So when a child, fentanyl is used in the for many who are getting colonoscopies are often given fentanyl and its also comes as a pain patch. And even a lollipop use for people with cancer and sort of endoflife care. When we hear about all these decks, were not hearing about hospital fentanyl. Its almost all illicit fentanyl and its almost all made inchina. So this fentanyl get into the us in one of two ways. One way is right through the us mail. And the u. S. Postal service, fedex, ups, dhl, they also know and other types of through the mail. Also comes to china through the mexican cartels. Importance it up and send it north through the border and its distributed through the same channels as like heroin, cocaine and meth. When the fentanyl arrived in the mexican cartels its usually pretty pure. 90 percent pure or more but the cartels with other putting agents, sometimes up like a benadryl, all sorts of cutting agents and then it set north through the border. The regional distributors even more and by the time it gets into the hands of the street buyers, nobody knows how strong it is. Thats a problem. Even the drug dealers themselves dont know how strong it is. But its also as you alluded to very hard to mix so it only takes 2 grains of rice were of fentanyl to overdose. Its barely visible to the eye so when drug dealers fight to mix it up, mix heroin with fentanyl, its almost impossible to do. I talked to a former fentanyl dealer used a mr. Coffee coffee grinder to mix up the fentanyl and heroin and this is the same mr. Coffee grinder you buy in the store and the result of that is you get whats known as hotspots. So some batches might be benign while other batches would make you overdose instantly. The book is not just about fentanyl, its about an entire class of drugs which you are calling novel psychoactive substances. Essentially, drugs that were concocted in a laboratory that imitate other more familiar drugs that typically come from a plant. The opium, poppy or marijuana or thecoca leaf. Many of these drugs were done , were created by legitimate researchers trying to advance science inone form or another. Can you talk about how the process from how those drugs go froma legitimate lab to a Clandestine Lab . When you think about traditional drugs, youve got heroin as you mentioned. Cocaine, marijuana. These all come from natural plants like you said so its very expensive and timeconsuming to grow the opium poppy for example. Its very susceptible to lawenforcement. Youve got these big deals, it easy for the policeto find out about them but these new drugs that youre talking about , novelpsychoactive substances are all synthetic. And theyre all made in a lab. So in the past they use the call them designer drugs. Basically the same thing. These are drugs that because they are synthetic, they can they manipulated so for example fentanyl, if you change the chemical structure just a little bit now youve got whats known as an analog of fentanyl and sometimes these fentanyl analogs are Even Stronger and more deadly than fentanylitself. So now we have literally hundreds and hundreds of new drugs whereas hundred years ago we only had a handful of drugs. Now we have up to hundred new ones each year. And so a lot of these drugs were actually invented like youre saying for legitimate medicalpurposes. And so they were made in medical science laboratories in the 70s and 80s. Then these drugs sort of work published in papers but these papers just sat around on dusty shelves in university libraries. No one taken too much attention until the internet age. In the internet age, all these old papers started to be published online and so clandestine chemists, the rogue chemist that i mentioned in my books title, they go on the internet and exhaustively work out all of these papers where scientists are talking about new drugs. These drugs might have said were intended for a medical purpose and they repurpose them as recreational drugs. Many are sold on the darkwet. They are also sold on the clear web they have in common is that theyre all made in china. This might be a good time to talk about the dark wet so im guessing you know, thats another thing people are not familiar with what emerges as a way to distribute these illegal and the esses, can you talk about the dark wet and its role . Dark wet is basically a disguised internet protocol where it is impossible to find out whos publishing a webpage. So the dark when his most famous for these markets, these bazaars sell everything illegal under the sunday so the most famous one was called silk road and that was taken down a few years ago. Space in texas . Congratulations. But the silk road and these other dark web markets at everything from guns to drugs you like fake rolex watches credit card numbers. Child pornography. Its really like the wild west. And its very hard to crack down unless theres some sort of human error so the code is basically unbreakable and a lot of times people who are buying and selling humidity by encrypted messages and its very hard to crack. So thats sort of immersed as the place where these new drugs are bought and sold and the scariest part is that teenagers are some of the most common consumers using the dark wet because theres so savvy result in situations where these teenagers and online, go on the dark web, by drugs using that coin, the crypto currency and have these drugs delivereddirectly to their door. You talk about the anonymity of the dark web some of these healers on the dark web were so confident in their anonymity that they were willing to talk to you, a reporter acknowledging yourself as a reporter in some depth about what they did. I was surprised, i wanted to interview dark web dealers and a number of them talk to me and one was willing to meet in person so this was a dark web dealer who was selling different analogs of fentanyl. So after fentanyl was banned these different analogs were still legal in china so what he would do is order different types of fentanyl analogs from china , then sent directly to his home and he would repackage them and sell them on the dark web. So i wanted to know his story. How you can morally justify this type of action considering the sign there. Keep going, you never know whats going to happen. Its a metaphor maybe of this literary festival. The scene by the way where you make this dark web dealer in person and even his daughter in the meeting, it was just an outstanding scene in the book. Talk about his rationale for why he did what he did. I was surprised, we met at a Fast Food Restaurant and he bought brought his daughter and he claimed to be doing good in the world and what he said was he wasnt opioid addict himself. He had been addicted to pain pills for a long time but they are very expensive and what he said was that the type of fentanyl that he sold was as a nasal spray so he actually made his own nasal spray. He showed it to me. It looked like something you would buy at cvs or walgreens except that it was much, much stronger than yourtypical opioid medicine. So one spray from this nasal spray was the equivalent of taking like a big oversized oxycontin pill and what he said was his prices were so affordable that he could help one contradicted opioid users maintain their addiction for a fraction of the cost of buying oxycontin and he said considering that big pharma and these Companies Like Purdue Pharma which are now being sued all over the country, considering the damage theyve done to this country, he considered this a sort of alternative way for people to maintain their addiction. He was kind of a robin hood figure. He didnt see himself that way. The other chapters in the book that really saying to me were the ones where you went to china and that for me was what separated this book from just that kind of a star ill report on a crisis the one that is really a wonderful read. Talk about your trips to china. Iq for those kind words. Back in 2017 i started reporting on fentanyl and ernest and everyone kept saying im 2017 was killing more people than any drug annually in american history. Worst crack avenue, worst end, worse than heroin or pills so i kept hearing all these physics. But no one had ever gone to the store. No onehad ever gone to china. Though i thought well, where do i start i dont speak chinese. So i just started googling by fentanyl in china. On the real web. On the service web. And it may sound silly but the list of companies came up. Dozens and dozens of Different Companies selling fentanyl in china just popped right up and i clicked on the webpages. They had their sales peoples email addresses right there i justemailed them , made a fake email address area i said i was interested in buying fentanyl and that if i came to chinawith baby willing to show me their lab . Lots of themsaid yes. So in early 2018, i bought a plane ticket and i showed up. I went to a city called wuhan and wuhan is not known to most westerners its a city of 11 million people. Its a chemical manufacturing hub. So they make a lot of legal chemicals. Thats mainly what they do. How to have a lot of universities there who produce scientists and chemists. Most of them go into the legitimate field but some of them into these illicit fields. And i found out there was a Company Called yuanchan who was making more fentanyl ingredients than any other company so no precursors are basically whats drivingthis epidemic. They are whats sold to the mexican cartels who make the rest of fentanyl the way and then north of the border and the equipment of sudafed so if you heard about the math prices you heard about these backwoods meth labs and these cooks would go into the cvs or walgreens and come out with all the sudafed in the store and use the sudafed to make meth. These fentanyl precursors are basically the equivalent and without them the mexican cartels worked in business. They dont have the can make these precursors. I went to this company and i emailed the salesperson and i said id like to meet you at your company and they said sure, we will meet you there at noon so i was actually based in a big hotel. I showed up in the lobby and i didnt know what was happening. It didnt look like a Chemical Company but they took me upstairs and showed me they had two floors of the hotel dedicated to their sales staff. So their sales staff was basically twentysomething recent college graduates, almost all of them and there were hundreds of them. They were in your goals, they look just like a western office and. And this was considered a good job for someone who spoke english. Exactly, they had a great health plan read gay people free cellphones to the employees. They had like movie nights where everybody went out, had free room and board. It turns out the salespeople lived in the hotel and all the while, they were selling chemicals for the deadliest dog on earth. In their mind legally or at least producing itlegally in china. It was legal in china and i even know it was legal in the us area the salespeople claimed not to know about the no problem so at first i was dubious but i found out that really fentanyl doesnt register in china even though it makes more fentanyl, the citizens there dont have a fentanyl problem so the fails salespeople said we dont even know what this is, we dont know why its sopopular. Some of these salespeople are selling from the same factory so maybe its just another one that somebody is interested in. They also claimed to sell 10,000 other chemicals. Some of them were maybe real basil sometime but their main moneymaker as the salespeople told me were the antenatal precursors and also steroids. They sell lots ofanabolic steroids which is the same situation. Itslegal in china schedule in the west. You have ever not provocative in this action of the book that you dont explore too much but its possible it makes a few people at the upper levels of these operations in china this is a reverse opium war situation. If youre familiar with the chinese opium war there were two of them in the early 19th century and basically england was selling lots and lots of opium to china. The chinese citizens were getting addicted in large numbers. So basically china said we want you to stop doing this but england refused. They went to war and then england one and in the spoils of war, england was given hong kong and so thats why it was the property of england. And went to war because the trade was so valuable they could not afford to see it and. Exactly, it was making so much money for england so now some people think of the fentanyl situation as a sort of reverse opium war because now china is selling this opioid and its people in the west who are consuming it and becoming addicted. Talk about what can be done or is being done by the Us Government with respect to what china is doing. The Us Government was very slow to act about the fentanyl crisis. In fact as recently as 2015, the dea published in their annual report that said fentanyl is not really a drug going to have to worry about. Its too powerful, users dont like it. And so basically, nothing to see here. There was only one year later in 2016 fentanyl overtook heroin and these other drugs to becomethe deadliest in us history. So since then, theres been a lot of sort of typical war on drugs policies we seen and in my book i explore a more rational way to battle the fentanyl crisis and i believe its something known as harm reduction. Harm reduction is basically this idea that people are always going to use drugs and as much as we dont want them to, theres nothing we can really do to stop them. Except we can try to make it safer. So there are a lot of different policies here towards our reduction in one of them is calledfentanyl testing strips. A lot of the reason people die from fentanyl is because they take other drugs fentanyl is in their area the singer prints and the singer tom petty both died because they prescription pills they thought were regular opioids but they were actually with fentanyl. Our rapper max miller diedthe same way. So one thing fentanyl testing strips to is you can make a mixture of your dog and you can get these strips in their. Just like a pregnancy test. You get them in and if theres one strike that fentanyl, if theres 2 stripes theres no and studies have shown that drug users are dumb. They realize if theres fentanyl in theretheyre less likely to use the drugs and therefore less likely to overdose and die but what the dea said about fentanyl was true, users dont like it. Theyre desperate to get the products they can get. Exactly and there are some instances where fentanyl is being sold as fentanyl and for some people its so powerful that actually attraction, but the vast majority of people only want the drug that they want so i also traveled to spain and they have an Amazing Program there, called to provide injection facilities these are places where users can legally go and use drugs. They can shoot up heroin or fentanyl, smoke crack cocaine red sounds crazy to most americans but there are doctors and nurses onsite. There are clean needles. There are treatment programs. Its basically all dedicated to making sure that people long time users can use these drugs safely and theyve never had a facility, had a death that one of these facilities anywhere in europe or canada where they have these facilities in the us they are illegal and there are none that are operating legally here. We seem to be much closer to a second possible solution you suggest in thebook which is legalizing marijuana. You point out the reason that might cut down on some of these overdoses is because its something we havent even talked about which there is a synthetic marijuana even though its a total misnomer, its not marijuana at all but if these drugs usually known as katie or spike you can buy legallyoverthecounter. A somewhat mimic the effect of marijuana in the brain but theyre much more powerful, more dangerous and you talk about those in a little bit. K2 and spice are basically called synthetic marijuana but really its not the same at all. They react on some of the same receptors but they send receptors into overdrive so whereas if you get stoned you might get the munchies, you might be kind of relaxed, watch a movie, with k2 and spice your heart starts beating fast. You overdose people die. And the reason these dogs became popular is not because people like them. Because of drug tests like the kind employers give employees and parents get the children. Marijuana shows up on these protests whereas k2 and spice dont show up on the contests so thats why they became popular. You said that part of the positive reaction to this book is that you have been invited to speak officials in washington about what our response onthe can you talk about what you shared with them. I have been lucky enough to talk to people in the highest rashes of federal and a lot of people what to do what i expect of them which would want to do which is to continue more a war on drugs policy so the way i look at it is the dea help take out pablo escobar. The colombian cocainekingpin. The number of decades ago. But since then cocaine has dried up. In fact theres more cocaine coming out of columbia now than ever before. Else home was put in prison and tried recently but that has not stopped the flow of drugs from mexico. Now china is the next country to be in our crosshairs and i understandit better than anybody. I was the first journalist to go inside a fence in a lab and i, we didnt talk about that here, youll have to read about in the book but i did get to go inside a lab and watch people deciding these types of s l on a scale i could have never imagined. It was very nerveracking. My wife was not happy about it. But you know, president trump. Ill give him some credit. Hes made fentanyl part of the trade more so now hes basically saying china cant get these fentanyl exports to the us under control, hes going to put more sanctions on different areas of chinese exports. And so at the same time the, people who commit low level of fentanyl offenses are still going to jail and in fact lowlevel fentanyl dealers are being given longer sentences and the problem with that is that often these dealers arenot the kingpins where hearing about. Often these are just addicted users themselves who are dealing to support their habit. So those are not the kind of people i think we should be targeting. Which is also a familiar story if youve been following the drugs worst since the 1980s. That might be a good note for us to upon. That would leave us 15 minutes for questions, anyone want to be the first person . We got one in the front and one in the back here, dont be shy. And ill be signing books at 1 00, like to down at. Its right down congress. Yes man. I, what advice you have for how to talk about this with kids who think spice the market . That is requested. I was coming up and i suspect whenyou are coming up , we got a lot of the dare program , just so you know and we were told that most all drugs could probably kill you. Unfortunately, now thats actually true. And the reason is because fentanyl is almost any pill or any powder. Cut into cocaine, internet , heroine like i said, prescription pills. About the only drug that you can really trust i would say would be marijuana read real marijuana and you can see the bus and smell them, its probably safe almost any pill or powder, if you havent checked it and you have used the fentanyl testing strip, no way of knowing that is in their until someone instantly and thats the most Important Message tell kids. The same is true of k2and spice, the potency can be random. With all the mediacoverage of the opioid process , all the emphasis on big pharma and unscrupulous physicians and pharmacists, it seems to me theres insufficient attention paid to personal responsibility. Would you comment on that western mark. Absolutely, i think when it comes to the Opioid Crisis the pills, i think most of these doctors were acting in good faith. My dad is a doctor and they were effective in line about how these pills were safe now doctors wanted people not to be consigned to agony. So the patients themselves often were just following doctors orders. So i have all the sympathy in the world for them and i dont have any sympathy for Companies Like Purdue Pharma which downplayed the risk of addiction. Now a days, things are a little different because opioids are not prescribed nearly as much as they were before. Theres a concerted effort being made to find alternatives to opioids and i think that for people who are just getting , have an injury now, they should be by all means consider alternatives. And the personal responsibility thing when people are educated is very important when it comes to these people who got hooked in the 90s and 2000s, taking her opioid bills away from them is not i dont think a good answer. Because a lot of these people just switch to street heroine. So theres always a very complicated issue. We might have one in the back there. You answered my question which is like both the legal bills they can get, why do they switch to fentanyl . I couldnt. Why dont they just take oxycontin and legal bills rather than having to switch to the fentanyl, can you talk about the crackdown on legal bills . That is definitely happening in a big way and theres all these new laws over the country. I talked to a patient from colorado who was a long time with the opioid user. She had, i dont think it was rheumatoid arthritis, i forget her specific condition but she walked into her Doctors Office and her doctor said before i can write you another prescription for opioids you have to attend this class in this class recommended alternative alternatives. Things like yoga, acupuncture and in a lot of cases even things like high levels of ibuprofen. So like i said, i think these are great things to consider from the start before you become addicted to these pills but for someone whos been using these for so long its sort of degrading and like i said, i dont think its the best answer. Yes, sir. I was wondering what you thought about in a lot of cultures like particularly rap music among younger kids, its used as a marketing tool. Houston has been talking about [inaudible] for a long time basically it was coding, coding mixed with soda and thats an opioid but much lower level opioid and a lot of wrappers have been killed themselves through drink and stuff like that but nowadays people are talking about xanax in different benzodiazepine and those are dangerous as well but in fact, the most lethal combination the doctors are seen are opioids mixed with benzodiazepine and both sedatives and kill people and i dont think its great at all for wrappers to be glorifying that but you are on notice. [laughter] i feel like the question is on point because sometimes a culture does develop around a particular dog and im thinking in particular of ecstasy in the 80s. By the way of factoid i got from the book, and my the last person that grew up in north texas to know that you could buy ecstasy at the bar at the star club until 1985 . Spirit totally legal. I did not know that but there was an entire culture of the grew up around the dog and some would argue that it was a relatively benign one compared to what we see today. Exactly bid that is the case of a lot of these drugs. Mdma, very few people die from that, marijuana nobody has ever died from an overdose. Lsd too. People dont realize that. Some people may have thought they were a bird and jumped off a roof but no one has ever died from an lsd overdose and so the new drugs coming out of china are fake lsd, fake marijuana from a fake mdma, ecstasy and all these drugs are more powerful and more likely to kill people. [inaudible] it might be a help and im not sure if that was your intention but im curious as to what you feel about ravana as an alternative to some of these painkillers . I dont use marijuana so i dont know but is it, an alternative to some of these painkillers that might, you know, might be less addictive and provide relief without all the downsides of these other drugs . Ive heard people talk about that as marijuana as a substitute for opioids but i dont know enough about it to say if i think its a good idea or not. Im not read enough about it but i will say that legalizing marijuana is something that should be done with caution and in colorado which was one of the first states, if not the first wave of states to legalize marijuana there been encouraging science. Kids arent taking it in large numbers for example, but theyre also distressing sides like people who are driving while high and a much better higher rate of fatalities for people driving while high and it seems like decriminalization is something working well in some places but for example, the country of spain and portugal both decriminalized all drugs and had been seen a lot of positive results from that so spirit criminalization meaning its not legal but youre not going to jail for it . Exactly. We will not go to jail for it but they arent weed stores on every block so things like that. You have to approach these things carefully. I think we have one in the back. Relative to the concept that you said drug users dont necessarily prefer fentanyl but when you watch the documentary you reference prince and tom petty and people that have incomes that if they wanted something that was vicodin, oxley, those people have the type of income and when you watch the documentaries the pushers pushing the fentanyl once they tested on the things that go on to sell the most are heroin that they laced with that and when they have an addict that dies that is their best seller. What is blissfully unaware as opposed to saying they dont want to knowingly say they are using it . He said a lot of good points there. Maybe stay at the mic because i will not remember all your questions but the first thing to know is if you want to prescription opioids and if you need them legitimately and you are prescribed by your doctor and getting them from a pharmacy those are safe. They are not instances of those being coated with fentanyl but if you are buying out the black market off the dark web from a street dealer or anywhere else of these pills, these benzos or excuse me, these legitimate looking of pain pills can be laced with the oxycontin logo or stamped with the vicodin logo and they can look 100 legitimate but they can be cut with fentanyl so these dealers have these pill press machines that can stamp the pills to look exactly the same and so tom petty, prince, whoever was getting their pills for them i think tom petty bought his on the street actually pretty came out of a show and he was in pain and bought some from someone on the street, if i am not mistaken. These sources use to have pills that were legitimate but now these pills are caught with fentanyl in greater and greater numbers. I cant stress enough how important it is to stay away from random blackmarket pills. What was the second part of your question . Do you remember . Right there be some people that do want fentanyl . Dimension in the book there are people who have used heroin for so long they cant get high from heroin. That was another good point. For a long time heroin users are not getting high anymore. When they take care when it basically is taking care of their withdrawal symptom so they dont have these really its like a really bad flu, ive often heard. Taking heroin simply gets them back to baseline but theyre not getting high. Sentinel, however, gets them high again because its so much more powerful and so you mentioned cases where people always ask me and this is the number one question i get and they say why would dealers dispense fentanyl if its killing their own client and white with a knowingly kill their own client. I talked to a lot of people about this and they say that when an addictive user hears that someone overdosed and dies they dont try to stay away from that batch. Oftentimes they say that must be the really good strong batch and so they go after that batch and that is the unfortunate reality for a lot of people. Yes, maam. I would like to bring the conversation back to marijuana. Its hard to hear, could you talk loudly. Ive got a little bit of a head cold. Just speak close to the microphone. I apologize to anyone behind me who gets this head cold from this microphone. I wanted to ask about marijuana because its my favorite subject. As we go on with the legalization of recreational and Medicinal Marijuana its obvious that the strains are more potent and people are seen as side effects and there are some detrimental effects of this. As we go on with this and as the war on drugs progresses how can we separate the language around regulating marijuana and the adverse effects of that separating out from the effects of sentinel. What language should we be using and looking for as we hear reports on this and as we get not just news reports but as politicians talk about it. What should we be listening for . While, for an interesting answer to that question we can look to the country of new zealand as i talk about in my book. Not usually what people think of when they think of drugs or drug policy but new zealand under took a very interesting experiment a few years ago and they legalized all these new drugs. Overnight this synthetic cannabis and all these party drugs they all became legal and so this was kind of a test case for the stuff you are talking about. What happened . Overnight at stopping the drug dealers in the drug manufacturers who were clandestinely producing and packaging these drugs. And so, the problem with these new drugs, including fentanyl is not actually the drug itself. Believe it or not you can take a safe dose of fentanyl. A safe dose of spice but the problem is nobody knows how much the dosage should be. Theres an old saying in toxicology, the dose makes the poison. Even water can be fatal if you drink too much of it. What this legalization did was it brought regulation into the marketplace and so in new zealand all of a sudden people had wellregulated synthetic marijuana and so in the u. S. , like i said, it was killing people left and right and people were overdosing but suddenly in new zealand they had a safe version of this synthetic marijuana and everybody there were almost no fatalities. That is an example of what happens in this only lasted a year and everyone freaked out. There was a lot of what about the children rhetoric and new england ended this experiment with legalization in the ensuing years the synthetic marijuana now again made by the drug dealers and made by the drug cartels is too strong and its not dosed properly and now again people in new zealand are dying in scores from synthetic marijuana. How can we extrapolate that to the u. S. . Andrew yang president ial candidate is in favor of decriminalizing opioids and so this is a very hard thing to swallow for lots of people that even for me when i first heard about it i wondered decriminalizing opioids we basically would be saying its okay to shoot up heroin and venting all and that did not make sense to me. What his argument is is that this is an addiction problem and we need to bring these people out of the shadow so when people are being locked up for heroin and fentanyl the recidivism rate isnt readily high and when people get out of jail and get out of prison they are very likely to use again. When we bring these people out of the shadows and when we provide them with treatment and with healthcare even with things like counseling the recidivism rate drops tremendously and so that may be the way we should start thinking about it. Thats probably a good note to end on because we reached the end of our time but before you go remember that both people will be selling bens book in the book tense and ben will be there signing it ten minutes from now. [applause] youre watching a special addition of book tv now airing during the week while numbers of congress are in their districts due to the coronavirus pandemic. Tonight the supreme court. 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